Say the ratio out loud before you open Reasoning — recalling it unprompted is exactly what the exam pays for.
Why it matters
It is the Indian application of the unity of domicile, and therefore the case that shows the doctrine is not merely a piece of English legal history. It is also the fact pattern that makes the criticism unanswerable.
Facts
A German wife was married to a domiciled Indian. He abandoned her. She contended that her pre-marriage domicile revived.
Held
Sections 15 and 16 of the Indian Succession Act, 1925 applied: during coverture her domicile remained his, and her pre-marriage domicile did not revive on abandonment.
Reasoning
Step one — the statutory rule. On marriage the wife acquires the domicile of the husband, and during coverture her domicile is the domicile of her husband. The exceptions are two, and neither fits desertion: where the wife lives separately under a decree of court, and where the husband is undergoing a life sentence.
Step two — revival has no application. Revival is the rule that the domicile of origin returns when a domicile of choice is abandoned without another being acquired — Udny v. Udny. A domicile of dependence is not a domicile of choice, and the wife abandoned nothing; her husband left her.
Step three — desertion is not one of the statutory exceptions. The Act names a decree of court and a life sentence. It does not name abandonment, and a court cannot add to the list.
Exam use
It opens: What is the domicile of a married woman in India? — state the statutory rule, the two exceptions, and this case.
Make the criticism, and make it precisely. The rule was designed to keep a family under one personal law. On these facts its operation is that a deserted wife is fixed with the domicile of the man who deserted her, which is the exact hardship that drove English law to the Indyka line of cases and then to abolition by s. 1 of the Domicile and Matrimonial Proceedings Act 1973. The English rule at its harshest is Lord Advocate v. Jaffrey, and Att. Gen. for Alberta v. Cook closed even the escape of judicial separation.
Connect it to the module's larger theme. India's family conflicts law is a law of gaps: no statute on the recognition of foreign matrimonial decrees though Satya v. Teja Singh asked for one; no legislation on the model Neeraja Saraph proposed; and here a surviving nineteenth-century rule that England has abolished. An answer that notices the pattern is worth more than one that recites the sections.
It does not decide anything about capacity to marry, which in India is governed by Parwatawwa v. Channawwa — and note that the husband's-domicile rule there is open to the same objection as this one, that it prefers one spouse's law for no reason but sex.